Do One Thing: Save Ink & Reduce Waste By Making Small Adjustments To Your Printing.

7 Comments

This week’s Do One Thing tip is actually a compilation of small things you can do at home or work to save ink and reduce waste in your printing. Without sacrificing print quality, there are a few little changes that go a long way towards this goal!

1. Reduce your margins. Smaller margins = less paper being used. Even reducing them by a tiny amount goes a long way on a huge document.

2. Print on the draft setting. For things you need to print for yourself, change the setting on the printer before you print to “draft” which prints quicker and with less ink. And yes, you can read it just fine, I do it often for records I need to print out.

3. Check out Ecofont. This new font saves ink by omitting some tiny spaces in the letters as it prints. Kind of like swiss cheese, but nowhere near as tasty.

4. Print on both sides of the paper. In case you haven’t noticed, each piece of paper has a back. 🙂

5. Don’t print in the first place. Instead of printing, can you just save the document on the computer or email it as a PDF? If so, when you go to print, just select “Save As A PDF” and save it to your desktop.

So what else can you do to save ink and reduce waste? If you have any tips, let us know in the comments!

I posted last week on my blog about printing to pdf to avoid killing trees. I hate drowning in paper, and it drives me crazy that people still print out emails. It also saves on file space if you have no physical files, only folders on your computer.

Another way to avoid wasteful printing is to use http://www.printwhatyoulike.com. It lets you slice and dice any webpage to remove the stuff your not interested in before printing. You can also change any website’s font to Ecofont, (even if you don’t have Ecofont installed on your computer) and you can save any page as a pdf.